The Cure space is such BS how the hell can a Bird of Prey do High Yield 3 Cure Elite needs too be toned down a little and that fIng timer is not helping any body Bird of Prey hit me with one shot then bam i blow up WTF this needs Fixed now.

Or shoot down the Bop's before they can even fire their torpedoes. If what i see in Cure Normal is similar in Elite, they're still made out of balsa wood and wet tissue paper.

I'll tell you why these people can't figure out how to beat Cure Space Elite.

Simply put the mission requires a single high enough DPS ship (preferably a fast escort) who has the job of destroying the two seperate spawns of BOP coming from the Cube bases while the other four players work together on one Cube Base at a time and take out the spawn from the Cube base they are working on.

Of course this requires a small chat session with the group to decide who can do the job of handling the two BOP spawns solo.

Since the current public que does not set you up in a chat room first people go in without discussing the battle plan and it turns into a Cluster Frack.

For those of you wise enough to have listened to my suggestion about the Elite STF channel let me give you the battle plan lingo that is used by experienced players.

After determining who can handle the two spawns of BOP solo the room leader will call out the order to take out the bases.

This is most often explained by the person with the following designation in the private chat room people join before launching the STF.

R-M-M-R-L

What that means is the other 4 player start on the far right taking out all the nodes under the cube as well as all the spawns that appear from that base while they are doing it. They then go to the middle cube and take out all those nodes after which they destroy the middle cube along with all the spawns that appear on the middle cube.

The 5th player is managing the easy to kill BOP spawns coming from the other two bases by himself. It is imperitive whoever does this job knows they can handle it.

Then its time to hit the two raptor spawns. Crowd control comes in handy here to buy you some time since they are making a B-Line for the Kang. Cross Faction consoles are available on the exchange for Fed Players. Graviton Pulse Generators and Theta Radiation Vent consoles can still be purchased with EC for a very reasonable price. Do an exchange search for CONSOLE PACK and see for yourself. Otherwise make sure you have a Bridge Officer crowd control power handy for the mission.

After destroying all the Raptors you destroy the far right cube and then everyone goes to the far left and deals with the last Cube Base.

Following this plan you can get the optional every time on the Elite Mode.

Simple Easy Peasy.

There are other variations of this plan, but the above is the one used most often.

After countless failures with the "kill all probes first and then all cube at the same time" method, I can only conclude that it is the wrong tactic. Sure it *can* work inconsistently, but it *rarely* works. Now a million people will respond with "Nuh-uh! We do it in our Private Teams of all Borg fitted Escorts all the time!" I humbly suggest that any heavy DPS private team is going to be successful at any map in the game almost without any other strategy.

The guides could help by saying right up front--if you are in a PUG and no one is coordinating, then you are very likely to fail the mission... a lot. In many cases a PUG is going to be doomed from the start. A bad PUG will have badly fit ships, inexperienced pilots or worse half-experienced trolls, poor comms, poor team composition, and probably no awareness of required roles. Write a guide for that. Good Luck.

Obviously the best answer is get in a good private team either from the Elite STF channel or by joining a solid STF fleet.

We run CSE all the time. We take out each cube one at a time. After each cube we sweep up the mobs. We always get the optional with 5+ minutes to spare. We don't even try too hard at team composition other than no more than 3 cruisers. Use voice comms (Teamspeak/Vent). Listen to the vets about fittings and BOFFs. Follow instructions in team. The only recipe you need for complete STF domination.

After countless failures with the "kill all probes first and then all cube at the same time" method, I can only conclude that it is the wrong tactic. Sure it *can* work inconsistently, but it *rarely* works. Now a million people will respond with "Nuh-uh! We do it in our Private Teams of all Borg fitted Escorts all the time!" I humbly suggest that any heavy DPS private team is going to be successful at any map in the game almost without any other strategy..

Your right. That plan is a recipe for failure.

See my last post.

P.S. You do not need a pre made with x5 high DPS escorts at all. I will admit though that the plan I described in my last post works most efficiently with two high DPS escorts.

You can do it with one on BOP duty to keep the Kang safe, but it becomes harder to get the optional.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is thinking that guarding Kang means you stay near Kang and attack the incoming enemy ships when the correct way to defend Kang is to destroy the incoming ships before they get near Kang.

When the plan is executed properly with two escorts you never even have to heal Kang. With only one escort if you don't have enough DPS and miss the optional you sometimes have to heal/extend shields on Kang, but you can still easily get the completion.

Actually, that strat is a decent one if you're cobbled into a low-DPS team. You can kiss the optional goodbye 99% of the time, but at least the team would stand a good chance of completing the mission. My only beef with this strat is that it lulls people into a false sense of security. They're usually not aware of the Raptor/Negvar onslaught that follows after the destruction of the cubes, but I fully expect scis and engs to have at least one placate to slow them down.

On a side note, if they're really lucky/skilled and indeed take the cubes down simultaneously, they might avoid the Rap/Neg spawns altogether. I haven't seen this happen in CSE, but we've done it a few times in KASE where those 2 spheres/4 probes never get a chance to come out of the gate.

However, if we have at least two high-DPS tacscorts, this strat should be thrown out the window.

That's the popular strat that most ESTF's default to because everyone is accustomed to going right first. It's a solid strat. However, I had my fastest runs with MRML. This puts a bit more work on the kanger, but it makes things more streamlined for the cubers.